You’re a hot, young software developer, fresh out of college and it’s time to make a living. Problem is, odds are likely you’re working at a job that forces you to maintain code older than you are. Don’t worry, unless you accepted a job at a start-up, or work at one of the bleeding edge […]

I try to write for about an hour each day in two 30 minute long power sessions, but sometimes even when I’m following along with my outlines or trying hard to keep to my scene cards, I just can’t quite get there. It’s during these times that I reach for a few tried and true […]

Many developers are best described as lazy. Not lazy in the fat slob on a couch, eating potato chips while they don’t even throw enough effort into playing World of Warcraft, but rather they’re like lizards on hot rocks. They will not move from a comfort zone, aim for elegant, no maintenance solutions, and generally […]

There are at least two main reasons I need a Windows XP guest to run in VirtualBox on my Desktop. If I’m running Linux, sometimes I need to run Windows software, like a MS-SQL server or Visual Studio to complete my work on a specific target that only works on Windows As Web development is […]

Virtual Box is a flexible, currently free, Virtualization environment not unlike VMWare or Hyper-V . If you’re a user of Windows 2007 Ultimate, you may have used a virtual copy of Windows XP, hosted locally before, VirtualBox is a similar solution and a similar tool to work through and try out. Many others can give […]

This is mainly just a short article to get me back in the habit of posting regularly. Recently, I’ve been working a bit with fine tuning Jetty, a light weight and configurable AppServer from Codehaus sponsored by Eclipse. Jetty gets production support from MortBay Consulting, who handle the heavy lifting for Codehaus. MortBay is also […]

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a fairly famous story by Joyce Carol Oates. In it, Oates’ character Connie ends up being convinced to walk outside and go off with Arnold Friend and his companion. The story was inspired by the three murders committed by Charles Schmid, Schmid’s inspiration for the murder […]

Software development has for some time been a personal, introverted and lonely profession. Teamwork is essential to the modern development environment on large projects, but there are still lone wolves out there hacking out 10,000 lines of code an evening. If you’re a developer, and if you aren’t this is still good advice, just not […]

Four different companies I’ve worked for used Velocity Templates. The technology isn’t a corporate secret, it’s a popular way to get that JSP/PHP style of template based development back into your Java. There are a few lessons I’ve learned from developing in Velocity that I’d like to share.